In the early days of the Old West, settlers were anxious to
make the trek to the Western United States in an effort to start new lives for
themselves (and to outrun the various Starbucks franchises, which were too numerous
even back then).
A wagon train of
homesteaders led by Tim Holt (playing himself) and his sidekick Chito Rafferty
(Richard Martin) reaches its final destination, so Tim and Chito make the trek
to nearby Silver Springs in search of more work.
On the road to town, the two men spy a sign
suggesting that homesteaders should stay away.
As he is dismantling the sign, Chito is fired at by an unknown
assailant.
Chasing down the sniper
reveals the culprit to be rancher Kenny Masters (Robert Sherwood), whose
enthusiasm for his new neighbors measures about the same as his delight at
having his horse stamp on his foot.
His
sister Peggy (Linda Douglas) is solidly in her brother’s corner on the
homesteaders issue.
Later, Chito has another run-in with Kenny at a saloon in
Silver Springs (he was making time with Ken’s girl)—the purpose of this is to
introduce us to the saloon’s owner, an oleaginous weasel who answers to “Regan”
(Frank Wilcox).
Kenny hires Regan and
his goons to waylay wagon master Wheeler (Kenneth MacDonald) as Wheeler heads
to town with a strongbox filled with the nesters’ land claims and every cent
they have in the world.
Tim and Chito
ride to the rescue before Wheeler succumbs to a gunshot wound, and vow to bring
the outlaws to heel with the eventual return of the money and claims.
But when Regan has his man Dawson kill the
marshal in Silver Springs to keep the lawman from identifying a gun left at the
scene of the robbery, Tim and Chito are forced to administer their own brand of
rootin’-tootin’ justice.
When not appearing in prestige productions such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), actor Tim Holt rode the range
as R-K-O’s resident Western star from 1940 to 1952, replacing George O’Brien
(whom Holt had worked with in 1938’s The
Renegade Ranger). Holt eventually churned out some 47 oaters
for the studio, and though the low-budgets undeniably reflected their B-western
nature, the professional gloss at R-K-O made many of them look far better than something
cranked out at Poverty Row. Eighteen of
those sagebrush sagas were made between 1940 and 1943, before Holt went into
the service in WW2 as a B-29 bombardier.
 |
| Hyperbole via lobby card: there is no lynch mob in Trail Guide. (Or fury, for that matter.) |
I like a lot of Tim’s post-war Westerns, but not nearly as
much as I prefer his early ones.
To me,
he had better sidekicks then: Ray Whitley, Emmett Lynn, Lee White, Cliff
Edwards.
His post-war saddle pal was
Richard Martin, who played a half-Latino, half-Irish saddle tramp named Chito
Jose Gonzales Bustamonte Rafferty.
(As
Chito himself might explain: “The Spanish half is for loving…the Irish half is
for fighting.”)
I didn’t care for
Chito’s shtick because I thought Martin was far too handsome to be a
sidekick…though I did chortle at the concept that Chito was unquestionably the
horniest sidekick in all of Saturday
matineedom.
Chito had quite an eye for
the ladies, but the women could usually discourage his advances by humming a
few bars of “Oh, Promise Me”—the slightest mention of matrimony, and Chito
would remember he left the iron on at home.
I also didn’t care for Chito because his name reminds me of
the snack food…which I can’t have anymore.
(But this is not a testament to his thespic talents, I assure you.)
Trail Guide
(1952) is a fairly unremarkable B-Western.
Its plot has been beaten to death in oaters, basically boiling down to
“The farmer and the cowman should be friends.”
Still, there are some positive characteristics about the movie—Tim is
solid as always, and the supporting cast includes
TDOY favorites like Three Stooges nemesis Kenneth MacDonald
(playing a good guy) and Frank Wilcox, not to mention serial stalwarts like
John Merton and John Pickard (of
Serial Saturdays’ Government Agents vs. Phantom Legion
[1951]).
(Tom London also has an amusing
running gag as an old codger trying to train his dog to leap through a
hoop.)
Martin does his sidekick thing to
the best of his ability—the only really weak performance to be found belongs to
Linda Douglas (in her film debut), who later married baseball great Hank
Greenberg; it’s not hard to see why the wooden Douglas didn’t stay in movies
too long (though she did appear in an additional Holt oater, 1952’s
Target).
Robert Sherwood isn’t terrible but he really
brings an admirable level of mayonnaise to his milksop role as Kenny—one look
at him and you wouldn’t be too surprised if the bad guys pantsed him and tossed
him into the girls’ locker room.
Produced for $89,000,
Trail
Guide actually lost money at the box office ($20,000).
The writing was on the wall for the Tim Holt
westerns by this time; competition from TV and the increasing costs of
producing something even as simple as a B-Western forced R-K-O to discontinue
the franchise after three more entries.
Boyd Magers at
Western
Clippings gives this one two stars (which seems about right), so I’d really
only recommend
Guide if you’re already
a Tim Holt fan.
The directorial credit
goes to Lesley Selander (last seen in this space as the auteur behind
Revolt at Fort Laramie), but with
the amount of stock footage they recycled from
Wagon Master (1950) at the beginning I think John Ford would have
been well within his rights to demand a co-credit. (
Trail Guide is available on DVD, as part of the Warner Archive's
Tim Holt Western Classics Collection Volume 4.)
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